Title: Organizational Change Capacity in Public Services: The Case of the World Health Organization
Abstract: Abstract In an increasingly dynamic environment, the question is: how can adequate adaptation to internal and external changes be achieved and managed? The answer is provided by the emerging literature stream on change capacity. However, there is still a lack of sufficient studies that analyse and compare organizations' change capacity in different contexts. Moreover, the existent studies mainly focus on the private sector as a field of analysis and tend to neglect organizations in the public sector that have to build this capacity too. This article addresses this gap by means of an analysis of the organizational change capacity of the World Health Organization (WHO) through a recently established conceptual framework for change capacity. This model contributes to the existent literature in that it combines the role of organizational context, change process and the necessity of learning from change to explain successful change. An analysis of an organization's change capacity allows it to better deal with the determinants of change capacity, which increases adaptation and survival. The findings provided reveal that the WHO has been lacking important determinants of all three dimensions that could have decisively enhanced its change capacity. Keywords: Change capacitychange managementorganizational learningpublic services Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank participants of the IOMBA class of 2004 and 2006 for their valuable comments during the discussion of the WHO case. Moreover, they would like to thank interview participants for their support for thoughtful discussion of the WHO's change path and feedback on our findings, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. Notes 1. WHO, internal document, November 2005. 2. If, however, organizational change clashes with the dominant cultural traits, culture can also become a source of inertia. 3. Available at: http://www.who.int/about/agenda/en/index.html (accessed 30 January 2008). 4. The authors would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this comment.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 75
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